Colophons finish a book, literally and metaphorically. The Greek origin of the word means “finishing stroke.”

These are the end credits of literature.

The earliest, handwritten, colophons were common in 6th century manuscripts. The first printed colophon appeared in the second book ever printed with movable type, the Mainz Psalter, created by Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer in 1457, translated below by Douglas C. McMurtrie in his work, The Book: the Story of Printing & Bookmaking.

The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen, and to the worship of God has been diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord 1457, on the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption.

Headings

The headings of this website have been set in Halyard Display, a Grotesque Sans typeface conceived in 2017 by the acclaimed type designer Joshua Darden, and designed with Eben Sorkin and Lucas Sharp, to tackle the nuanced needs of textual representation across traditional and modern media.

Halyard Display boasts a robust structure and a subtly distinctive character, balancing clarity of reading and visual impact for both print and digital headlines. And, the choice of a modern sans-serif font complements the modern content of a designers’ portfolio.

Unlike Halyard Text and Halyard Micro, its siblings designed for smaller text, Halyard Display features pronounced details and sharper contrasts in stroke widths, which ensure that it captures the viewer's attention as they scan online content or notice a billboard from a distance.

You may have noticed Halyard Display on your UPS shipping labels, where legibility is critical for both machine and human readers.

Letter spacing at 0.02em helps tighten up the text in headings. A 1.4em line height keeps longer blocks of heading tight and clean.

And, let’s just pause for a moment and enjoy the the uppercase “Q” and the lowercase italic “g” with its quirky combination of slant and rotation.

Release v 3.1.18
last updated: 2024-05-15

This website, like all software, is a work in progress. Content, copy, design, layout, etc. are all simultaneously unfinished and satisfactory. There are known defects, hopefully none P0.

Michael Peachey, San Mateo, CA

Paragraphs

The paragraphs of this website are set in Acumin Pro, a modern sans serif font celebrated for its warm appearance which comes from its subtle humanist design influences. Acumin Pro was designed by Robert Simbach at Adobe in 2015 and is characterized by open letterforms and a balanced distribution of weight.

Compared to Halyard Text, Acumin Pro has a neutral character, contributing to its legibility and making it more adaptable to a wide array of design contexts. And, the more traditional, less quirky, letter shapes are good for dense blocks of copy.

A 1.5em line height gives space for readability. And, as I am not a thief of sheep, all lowercase body copy has been set without modification to the designer’s well-considered letter spacing.